Current Savers Blog

First, a bit of Reuters history:

Reuters links with Sir Douglas Mawson, Australia’s most celebrated Antarctic explorer, began in 1911 when the company helped finance the young explorer’s maiden voyage to Antarctica.

In 1911, the Reuters Telegram Company Ltd sent a hand written telegram confirming it had pledged 1,000 pounds to the Australasian Antarctic Expedition lead by Mawson (see picture above.)

The significance of Mawson’s expedition was that it was largely financed and led from Australia, which as a nation was little more than 10 years old. East Antarctica, the greater mass of the Antarctic continent that lies south of Australia, the Indian Ocean and Africa, was one of the least-explored parts of the ice continent.

Mawson sailed a stout whaling ship named Aurora from Hobart in December 1911, bound for Macquarie Island and Antarctica, intent on mapping the unknown coast around Cape Denison, an area west of the region visited by Britain’s Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton.

He set up a wireless relay station on Macquarie Island, which would later transmit the first Antarctic radio signals.

On January 8, 1912 Mawson reached Cape Denison, at the western end of a great bay Mawson named Commonwealth Bay, the windiest place on Earth.

Reuters correspondent  Pauline Askin is sailing in early December to the Antarctic for a six -week expedition  on the ice continent where she will help restore Mawson’s huts on Commonwealth Bay.

During the expedition, Pauline will report on topics ranging from climate change and the environment to tourism and Christmas celebrations in Antarctica.

You can follow Pauline’s experiences in one of the harshest environments on Earth in this blog.

The phrase “catching a few rays” might conjure up images of lying on a sunny beach.

But Germany’s Renewable Energy Act has given that phrase a whole new meaning. I’ve discovered that you can get paid for capturing the sun’s energy on your roof, converting it into CO2-free electricity with the help of special equipment, and feeding it into the grid — and watch the investment yield handsome long-term returns.

The German feed-in tariff system is as simple as it is successful – which is probably why Germany produces as much solar power as the rest of the world combined. German utilities are obliged under the Renewable Energy Act to pay above-market feed-in tariffs to producers of photovoltaic or wind energy for a period of 20 years. Germany will add up to 3 gigawatt of PV electricity this year. 

Here’s how the system works. 

Two years ago, after writing this feature on why Germany leads the world in photovoltaic electricity production despite being covered by clouds half the time, I decided to crack open my piggy bank and borrow some money to invest in a modest 6.8 kWp solar power system for my roof (below left). I added a carport (above right) so that I could put up more solar panels. 

The system cost a total of 30,000 euros and it produces about 5,000 kilowatts of electricity each year. More important, that saves about 2,700 kg of CO2 emissions. The 5,000 kw is about 500 kw a year more than we use. The local utility is required to buy those 5,000 kw of CO2-free electricity that spin through a meter and into the grid from me at 49 cents per kilowatt for a fixed 20-year period. I buy about 4,500 kw back each year at the current rate of about 18 cents per kw. That amounts to about 2,400 euros of revenue per year, with monthly payments from the utility peaking at about 500 euros in June. (I pay a separate 70 euros per month to the utility for the electricity we use).

I got such a buzz from watching the meter spin green energy off the roof and into the grid that I asked myself: Why stop there? I started looking for another roof.

The national feed-in tariff the utility pays for each kw of green electricity I pump into their grid fell from 49 to 46 cents in 2008 but the price of solar panels fell even further.

So I borrowed 40,000 euros from a bank and rented the roof of a local kindergarten (below) in late 2008 to build an even larger PV system – 10 kWp that produces about 9,000 kw per year (saving nearly 5,000 kg of CO2). That brings in about 3,900 euros per year that will pay off the bank loan over about 12 years. 

After that, I asked myself again: Why stop now? The feed-in tariff fell to 43 cents per kw in 2009 but the price of solar panels fell even further. So I borrowed an additional 80,000 euros and rented the roof of a local school’s gymnasium (below right) – 20 kWp producing about 19,000 kw per year (cutting 10,000 kg CO2) and yielding some 8,200 euros. My revenues from the utility also go directly to the bank to repay the loan.

I was hoping to rent another school roof in Berlin this summer but there were all sorts of bureaucratic snags and the project was scrapped. But in 2010 – even though the feed-in tariff will fall to 39 cents for the 20 years to 2030 – I’m hoping to find another roof for an even larger system.

There’s no getting rich quick using this “business model”, but it is eliminating a few tonnes of CO2 each year and the loans will have been paid off in little more than a decade.

The feed-in tariff for new systems will probably fall by about 10 percent each year and the price of solar panels will probably keep falling at a similar rate. By about 2015, it’s quite possible that the feed-in tariff utilities pay will have fallen to the same level as cost of conventional electricity — the magic “grid parity” point.

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

Energy efficiency will have to make the single most-important contribution if policymakers are serious about limiting greenhouse gas emissions and dampening growing demand for fossil fuels.

Energy efficiency will not remove the need to invest in large volumes of wind, solar and nuclear generation, or in technology for carbon capture and storage, but it does form the third leg of the triad.

In the United States, nowhere have efficiency initiatives been given higher prominence and become as deeply entrenched in the public policy process as in the state of California. In response to a series of power crises, the state has adopted some of the toughest standards anywhere in the world.

The 1974 Warren-Alquist Act, signed by then-governor Ronald Reagan, created the State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission, now renamed the California Energy Commission (CEC), with a mandate to develop minimum efficiency requirements for new construction and appliances.

Efficiency improvements have been enforced through a strict standard-setting process.

Title 24 of the state code of regulations prescribes detailed requirements for all new buildings and major redevelopments in the state. Title 20 establishes standards for appliances sold to in-state customers, including heating and cooling systems, lighting units and refrigerators. Both have been repeatedly tightened to require higher levels of efficiency.

The objective is to limit the need to build new generation and transmission capacity by cutting electricity consumption in heating and lighting applications.

Measuring the amount of generation and greenhouse emissions avoided this way is difficult since it involves a counterfactual — comparing the amount of energy actually used and the amount that would have been needed in the absence of conservation measures — which can never be known for certain.

But by any yardstick, the amount of generating capacity and greenhouse gas emissions avoided by these “negawatts” has been substantial.

THE ART OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY

Prior to 1974, California’s installed generating capacity was 30 Gigawatts (GW) and growing 6 percent per year, with more than half the annual increase required to supply new homes and buildings.

California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld, one of the godfathers of the efficiency movement, claims Title 24 building standards cut energy use per square foot for heating and cooling in new buildings by 50 percent in the ten years between 1975 and 1985. A decade later savings had avoided the need to build 2.5 GW of new generation.

Rosenfeld claims even larger success for standards to improve domestic refrigerators. Progressively tighter state and federal regulations for new appliances, as well as improvements in technology, have cut annual energy consumption from an average of 1800 kilowatt hours (KWh) in 1974 to 450 kWh in 2001.

Consumption has been cut even as the typical refrigerator’s volume has grown 10 percent from 18 cubic feet to 20, making a compound efficiency gain of 5 percent per year.

Rosenfeld estimates the amount of energy saved, in California and now nationwide as standards have been adopted at federal level, is equivalent to around 50 GW of generating capacity (see the diagram on page 48 of Rosenfeld’s famous paper on “The Art of Energy Efficiency”.

CPUC ADOPTS AMBITIOUS TARGET

The drive to reduce power consumption has accelerated following the state’s devastating power crisis in 2000-2001.

“Energy efficiency is the first priority in California’s loading order for energy resources” (ahead of solar, wind, nuclear or fossil fuels) according to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates electricity rates charged by investor-owned utilities (IOUs) in the state.

CPUC has now included energy efficiency objectives in its IOU rate-setting process. Utilities receive an increase in the rate charged per kilowatt hour in return for meeting certain load-reduction targets.

CPUC has adopted targets that would cut peak generation about 450-500 MW per year between 2006 and 2013. Assuming they are met, California’s four IOUs would avoid the need for around 4 GW of generating capacity by the end of 2013 (roughly four large nuclear or coal-fired plants)

For comparison, the Western Interconnection, of which California is the largest component, has around 178 GW of generating capacity at present, so the avoided capacity would be equivalent to around 2 percent of all generating capacity on the western power grid.
CASH FOR CLUNKERS, REDUX

California’s approach is now being adopted by the Obama administration (Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a self-described “energy efficiency nut”).

The administration has already run a cash-for-clunkers programme to provide a boost for automakers while giving customers an incentive to retire older, less efficient vehicles in favour of modern cars that achieve higher mileage per gallon.

But the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act also provides $296 million of funding for State Energy Efficiency Appliance Rebate Programs (SEEARP) — a cash-for-clunkers system to replace aging clothes washers, refrigerators and room air conditioners with more energy efficient versions.

California’s share is $35 million, and the state proposes to make rebates available for purchases made during a one-month period from March 17 and ending on April 22, 2010. Rebates will be offered for 125,000 washing machines, 150,000 refrigerators and 100,000 air conditioners.

“COMFORTABLE CONSERVATION”

Rosenfeld has calculated that the amount of energy used to produce a dollar of GDP fell by a factor of 4.5 between 1845 and 1998, after adjusting for inflation, a compound annual improvement of 1 percent, driven by market forces.

But the average concealed substantial variations. Conservation rose to as much as 4 percent per year following the first oil shock, until real oil prices fell in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, slowing the pace of improvement.

If the rate could be raised to 2 percent per year — double the long-term average but just half the rate achieved after the first oil shock — energy consumption per unit of output could be cut by two-thirds in just over 50 years.

“Comfortable conservation” (getting the same quality of heat, light and output for a fraction of the energy by reducing waste) is now the central objective for the coterie of physicists advising the White House, and is likely to be one of the central policy themes over the remaining years of the Obama administration.

Such gains are perfectly feasible. U.S. motor manufacturers achieved even larger improvements in engine efficiency in the early 1980s, though the gains were used to build larger and more powerful vehicles rather than reduce fuel consumption.

The real prize, however, is in the emerging markets, where most appliances and buildings still operate at just a fraction of the efficiency of their advanced-country counterparts, and where the scope for efficiency gains is huge.

In effect, the only way to continue raising living standards, especially in developing countries, while limiting emissions is to take the success achieved in California refrigerators and replicate it across all the other energy-consuming sectors on a worldwide scale.

India has ambitious plans for solar power as the country looks to boost its solar output to 20 gigawatts by 2022 from close to zero, as Reuters reported in this story.

Some companies are already looking to capture some of the demand they see growing in India.

U.S.-based solar cell maker Suniva finished this week a project with Titan Energy Systems Ltd for a large scale project in West Bengal.

BP Solar also sees a lot of promise in the Indian market, the company’s chief executive said in a recent interview with Reuters.

That chimes with comments from solar thermal player BrightSource, which is looking for partners in India as well as China.

With various companies eyeing the glimmer of future demand and new orders, we wanted to know who you think will be the winners from India’s solar program.

(Photo: A labourer cleans solar cells placed on a window of a newly constructed solar housing complex in Kolkata. Photo Credit: Parth Sanyal / Reuters)

He started late, made them laugh for the first 5 minutes then gently kicked out the media.

“I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next president of America,” he said. Everyone laughed.

“Now I’m a recovering politician”.

On a speaking tour that touched down for a $500-a-plate dinner in Toronto Tuesday evening, the former U.S. vice president and co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC  told a near-full banquet room of 1,300 members from the “mostly telecoms” business community about his perspective on the green, clean economy.

Problem was not much of it got out during his opening remarks, other than much praise for event sponsor Allstream and that Gore is a big fan of companies that challenge the old way of thinking in times of uncertainty.

“Now I know that we are meeting at a time when many business leaders in particular are focused on what the physical changes on our planet and in our ecosphere mean for the former plan for business and the changes that are under way are completely unprecedented, incredibly significant. And I personally am very impressed with the leadership that many (Canadian) businesses have been providing.”

He also took a few jabs at award-winning scientist, author and journalist David Suzuki, who shared a table with Gore at the event and whose foundation I was told would be receiving a donation of $100,000 from the night’s ticket sales.

“I have to admit it’s always so, I don’t know what the word is, not upsetting but (Suzuki) looks so much younger than me. Many people are just amazed for someone who is almost 100 years old, it’s absolutely astonishing.”

In his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, published earlier this month, Gore calls for a collective will to solve climate issues because the tools are already available.

Come to think of it, it makes perfect sense that Gore is calling for collective will to solve the climate quagmire — his resume is chock-full of shared titles that echo the sentiment of collective brainpower. He was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, co-founder and chair of Generation Investment Management, (a firm devoted to sustainable investing), a member of the board of directors of Apple Inc., and co-founder and chair of Current TV, a television network for young people based on viewer-created content. (Incidentally, Citizen TV just last week announced it is cutting 80 jobs, but even that doesn’t make him someone who tends to “go it alone”.)

In the script of his speech which he was to deliver after the dozen or so journalists were escorted out of the ballroom, Gore argues “Physical changes in our planet will influence global business and require new corporate strategies that take into account the broader environmental, social and political issues involved in shaping the clean economy of the future.”

What do you think of Al Gore’s message that businesses need to adapt to a changing environment?

(Picture: Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore makes a point during a roundtable discussion at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas, Nevada August 10, 2009. REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus)

A report by a group of leading scientists that global warming is accelerating and that world sea levels could rise at worst by 2 metres by 2100* is grim reading.

But sceptics are using a flood of leaked e-mails from a British University — dubbed “Climategate” – to question the findings.

You can read the Copenhagen Diagnosis here, by 26 researchers worldwide.  It says a thaw of summer sea ice around the North Pole, for instance, has far outpaced projections in a report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) two years ago. They say world emissions must peak by 2020 to avoid the worst of climate change.

They say that sea levels could rise by perhaps a metre, at worst 2 – a figure also mentioned recently by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon — and far above scenarios in 2007 by the IPCC. More than 190 nations will meet in Copenhagen from Dec. 7-18 to try to agree a new pact to combat global warming.

But the leak of thousands of hacked documents from the University of East Anglia has added fuel to the debate because they include snide comments about climate sceptics and exchanges about how to present the data to make the global warming look convincing.

Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the university, is quoted today as saying that he “absolutely” stands by his findings and says the suggestion that there was a conspiracy to alter evidence was “complete rubbish”.

I’ve had a several e-mails from people who doubt humans are to blame for global warming saying that “Climategate” indicates that the Copenhagen Diagnosis is a new example of alarmism. Will this be a new pattern before Copenhagen?

Experts say the leaks from the University don’t affect conclusions by scientists who found in the 2007 IPCC report that it was more than 90 percent sure that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, were to blame for warming over the past 50 years. Governments — including the United States when President George W. Bush was in office — also signed off on those findings.

But the U.S. Senate has not agreed carbon-capping legislation and the leaks are hardly a good argument to persuade waverers to join other industrialised nations in capping carbon emissions.

*by 2100! thanks for pointing out!

(Picture: Icebergs float in the calm waters of a fjord, south of Tasiilaq in eastern Greenland August 4, 2009. REUTERS/Bob Strong)

A three-week tour from the Colorado Rockies to the Arctic Ocean, the tropics, Antarctica and then back again to the Arctic again can give a new perspective of the world.

“You get a feeling of how small the earth is,” said Pavel Romashkin, project manager for a scientific mission that just completed such a trek. “All of us are on a really small place, this little planet of ours.”

The HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observation mission, sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, takes researchers aboard a highly modified Gulfstream jet to measure carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other gases in the atmosphere at nearly all the earth’s latitudes.

Romashkin, a scientist with the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, was joined by researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a handful of universities and academic institutions.

The goal is not to prove or disprove that global warming is occurring, but simply to gather information about what is really in the air 1,000 to more than 40,000 feet above the earth’s surface, Romashkin said.

 ”This is where the emissions are coming up, this is how far they’re going up, this is where they’re staying in the air,” he said. “All we can do is collect facts about what is in the atmosphere. This is a fact of life.”

The gathered real-world data can be used to check the accuracy of weather and climate models, he said. Ultimately, such data could be used to ensure the accuracy of carbon-trading or carbon-capping systems, if any are enacted.

Among the early observations from the journey, according to Romashkin:

* Pollution over the Southern Hemisphere appears to be much greater than atmospheric models predict. Models appear to underestimate the extent of transport from the Northern Hemisphere.

* A band of pollutants gave the atmosphere over the Arctic a yellowish cast somewhat like the legendary haze hanging over cities like Los Angeles, according to the scientists. That pollution, seen in early November, was directly attributable to industrial and urban emissions coming from Asia and transported north by atmospheric currents.

* Layers of gases and pollutants are often clearly separated from each other, with dirty bands quite distinct from the clear air. The plane could be flying through a band of thickly polluted air drifting from Asia, then increase a bit in altitude and be in fresh, clean air, Romashkin said.

The pole-to-pole journey concluded last Sunday with a trip from Anchorage back to the aircraft’s base in Broomfield, Colorado. It was the second of five planned over a span of about three years. The first three-week pole-to-pole trek was last January, and the next one is planned for this coming March and April.

The plan is to conduct flights during varying seasons of the year, Romashkin said.
As a government-funded National Science Foundation project, the mission makes all its data available to the public.

-Susanne Charlesworth is a member of SUDS – Sustainable Drainage Applied Research Group, Coventry University. The opinions expressed are her own.-

The scenes of flooding in Cumbria are a shocking illustration of how Britain’s ageing drainage infrastructure is failing.

The function of the majority of drainage structures is to remove water from inhabited areas as soon as possible via so-called receiving watercourses as conduits to carry excess water away. Unfortunately, cities and towns have grown beyond capacity, back-up floodplains are built upon, and water overflow has nowhere to go.

Householders are shown on television blaming the government and demanding that something must be done to prevent flooding.

In my opinion, part of the solution lies in sustainable drainage, which mimics nature by encouraging filtration via permeable and vegetated surfaces and detention via ponds, wetlands and slowly flowing water.

By slowing the water flow, SUDs offers a way of attenuating the storm peak, allowing the water to slowly dissipate. As it does this, pollutants are sifted out of the water. Since many SUDs devices involve vegetation, the sustainable approach also enhances biodiversity, amenity and local landscapes.

You would think planners, Local Authorities and even individual householders would be falling over themselves to incorporate SUDs into their built environment. But no. While SUDS have been around for several decades, particularly in the U.S., Sweden, France and latterly in Scotland, uptake in England and Wales has been slow.

People argue that the cost is prohibitive and that it is difficult to maintain. Negative views could be countered by research and development, education and information.

There is also the issue of money. Research and development is expensive.

Legislation in England and Wales does not necessarily encourage the implementation of SUDs. Rather, it has get-out clauses to enable SUDs to slip down the agenda.

The problem is more wide-ranging than this, involving everything from the trend for paving front gardens, to wider issues of SUDs devices such as wetlands actually being used as water treatment installations rather than “natural” ecosystems which area protected from dirty urban water.

There is no way I would suggest that SUDs would have prevented the current flooding, but it could have helped. The likelihood is that winters in Britain will be wetter, and the weather more stormy in general. We need, therefore, to plan now for what looks like uncertain times ahead for the British weather. If the future is wet, then the future has to be SUDs.

Advocates for renewable energy hail net-metering as a key policy so that electricity from solar and wind is generated at the same place where it is consumed.

Supporters refer to it as the policy that lets the electric meter spin backwards. It allows people who own solar power systems, for example, export electricity to the grid and earn credits — at retail prices — on their utility bill.

In a new report called “Freeing the Grid,” advocates with several groups grade each state on their net-metering policies.

Environmental trendsetter California tied for fifth, but Colorado got the top spot.

Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey followed Colorado in the ranking, while California, Oregon and Pennsylvania tied for fifth.

Seven states flunked by default. Those states  — Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas — have no statewide net-metering policy.

The report also looked at how states fare on another key policy: interconnection standards, which determine how a generator on a customer’s site plugs into the electricity grid.

The study named Virginia, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, DC and Maryland as the top winners, respectively, in that realm. California came in at number 12, with a B.

(Photo Credit: Cheryl Ravelo / Reuters)

The biggest greenhouse gas emitter in California isn’t in California.

A string of PacifiCorp power plants are the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide included in the state’s 2008 inventory of carbon sources tied to state use.

California aims to start a cap-and-trade system for carbon pollution in 2012, if it is not preempted by a federal plan, and emissions reports by big power plants and the like represent a step toward that goal.

In-state and out-of-state power plants are roughly equal in the amount of carbon dioxide they produce, and together account for about a quarter of the state’s emissions. A weak economy has raised the stakes for California’s energy plans, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently vetoed legislative renewable power goals that would have limited out-of-state supply. Instead he set a target with an administrative order that was less restrictive.

The biggest in-state California sources of CO2 were Chevron, Shell and BP refineries, accounting for under 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent each in a chart of top emitters released by the California Air Resources Board. (One PacifiCorp plant in Wyoming had emissions over 15 million metric tones.)

The biggest source of emissions in California, though, is transport, and the 38 percent of emissions from that is not included in refineries’ totals. The Air Resources Board plans to give an update of its cap-and-trade program on Tuesday. 

(Reuters picture by Kim White of Chevron refinery)